Share

Should external innovators be organized in collaborative communities or competitive markets? The answer depends on three crucial issues.

advertisement

To appreciate the important role that outside innovators can play, look no further than Apple Inc.’s wildly successful iPhone. Thousands of external software developers have written complementary applications for the iPhone that have greatly enhanced its value, transforming the product into a blockbuster that has become the center of a thriving business ecosystem. Of course, the fundamental concept of “open innovation”1 — relying on outsiders both as a source of ideas and as a means to commercialize them — is hardly new, but companies have struggled with precisely how to open up their product development to the external world. For starters, many executives have little idea how to motivate and manage outside innovation. Specifically, should external innovators be organized as a collaborative community or as a competitive market?

Collaborative communities are perhaps best known through the Linux Foundation’s Linux and through other open-source software efforts that are governed loosely by social norms and “soft” rules to encourage open access to information, transparency, joint development and the sharing of intellectual property. A remarkable aspect of communities is that members are often willing to work for free.2 Competitive markets are strikingly different. Rather than collaborating, external innovators in a market will develop multiple competing varieties of complementary goods, components or services. Customers then choose from among the different offerings. The classic example here is the multibillion-dollar video game industry, where companies (Nintendo Co., for example) develop a hardware console (Wii) and encourage third-party businesses to write game software for that platform. In a market, external innovators are busy focusing on their own economic interests, which often results in fierce competition — and little cooperation — among them.

Because the dynamics of communities and markets are so dramatically different (see “Markets Versus Communities”), companies need to consider carefully which approach makes the best sense for their objectives. From our research, we have identified three critical issues that managers should take into account when making that decision.

Member

Subscriber

About the Authors

Kevin J. Boudreau is an assistant professor of strategy at the London Business School. Karim R. Lakhani is an assistant professor and Richard Hodgson Fellow at the Harvard Business School.

References

1.Economist Friedrich Hayek’s longtime insight of distributed knowledge in the economy has been embraced and developed in modern research on open innovation. See, for example, E. von Hippel, “Democratizing Innovation” (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005); and H. Chesbrough, W. Vanhaverbeke and J. West, eds., “Open Innovation: Researching a New Paradigm” (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

2.Lakhani and Wolf have shown that 60% of open-source software developers volunteer their time and efforts to the various projects. See K.R. Lakhani and R. Wolf, “Why Hackers Do What They Do: Understanding Motivation and Effort in Free/Open Source Software Projects” in “Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software,” ed. J. Feller, B. Fitzgerald, S.A. Hissam and K.R. Lakhani (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2005), 3-22.

3.Pisano and Verganti discuss the trade-offs between various types of external collaborations, including working with a select set of elites. See G.P. Pisano and R. Verganti, “Which Kind of Collaboration Is Right for You?” Harvard Business Review 86, no. 12 (December 2008): 78-86.

6.Nuvolari has extensive examples of collective invention in a range of historic settings. See A. Nuvolari, “Collective Invention During the British Industrial Revolution: The Case of the Cornish Pumping Engine,” Cambridge Journal of Economics 28, no. 3 (May 2004): 347-363.

12.Belenzon and Schankerman show that altering details of how an open regime is governed affects the types of outsiders who participate in open innovation. See S. Belenzon and M.A. Schankerman, “Motivation and Sorting in Open Source Software Innovation,” CEPR discussion paper no. DP7012, Centre for Economic Policy Research, London, October 2008, http://papers.ssrn.com.

14.Apple, for example, has been under significant pressure to limit the number of “free” or low-priced applications at the iTunes Store because many of the professional application developers are finding that they cannot economically compete with similar free applications.

17.For a detailed discussion of the “regulatory” role played by multisided platforms, see K. Boudreau and A. Hagiu, “Platform Rules: Regulating the Ecosystem Around a Multi-Sided Platform,” chap. 3 in “Platforms, Markets and Innovation,” ed. A. Gawer (Northampton, Massachusetts: Edward Elgar, in press).

19.As a matter of open community norms, community licenses such as the Berkeley Software Distribution, the General Public License or Creative Commons license tend to be applied broadly rather than as a matter of nuanced application of contracting instruments to attend to particular governance challenges.